A comparison of multi-cloud provisioning platforms

Although cloud computing has been around for over a decade now, many issues of the first hour still persist. Vendor lock-in, poor interoperability and portability hinder users from taking full advantage of main cloud features. On the industry side, the big players often adopt proprietary solutions to guarantee a seamless management and orchestration of cloud applications; on the research side, the TOSCA specification has emerged as the most authoritative effort for the interoperable description of cloud services. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a TOSCA-based orchestration framework for the automated service provisioning. We also compare this approach to two open-source orchestration tools (Heat, Cloudify) with respect to the deployment of a two-tier application on an OpenStack environment. Test results show our method performs comparably to the aforementioned tools, while maintaining full compliance with TOSCA.